Archive for the 'Technology/2.0' Category

It’s been an incredibly busy summer creating traveling exhibitions and building a new digital archive, a new Web site, and a new Street Art course. Here is the syllabus for the course.

St. Lawrence University Street Art Graphics!

AAH 3014 SYLLABUS – Fall 2015

Course Overview

In this 200-level studio course, students will work individually and in groups to create street art in the form of wheatpastes, stickers, stencils, silkscreens, and a final project that will be placed in a public venue in Potsdam or Canton. A social media component is also included to meet other street artists, see their work online, and become part of the global street art community. The course will examine concepts of character design, appropriation, memes, tropes, and culture jamming, as well as the “do-it-yourself” DIY punk ethic that is the basis of much street art. In addition, the course offers students the opportunity to conduct research and write about street art ephemera for an online digital archive available on three platforms:

Artstor’s Shared Shelf Commons, a free, open access international digital image library of arts and sciences.

The Street Art Graphics digital archive is based primarily on contemporary street art stickers and ephemera related to street culture from countries around the world, including Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States. Topics addressed include animal rights, consumer capitalism, the environment, football, gender and sexuality, labor, police brutality, political protests, racism, social justice, and surveillance, among others. The course will enable students to use real world examples of street art culture to understand current global issues. Incorporating critical thinking and visual/media literacies, students will learn how to annotate images, hone their writing skills, and contribute their work to a vibrant and unique digital image archive. A digital geo-mapping project at the end of the semester will further contextualize items in the archive. A new Web site for this purpose, entitled People’s History Archive, will allow students to publish mini-exhibitions about street art ephemera with timelines and maps.

Objectives

To learn how to create, analyze, and interpret images and situate them in global socio-historical contexts

To learn about different rhetorical strategies artists employ in order to communicate their various messages

To improve writing skills

To gain a better understanding of digital technologies and their real world applications

To contribute materials to an international digital image library of arts and sciences and scholarly Web sites

Ultimately, this course is about creativity, finding your own voice, and figuring out what you want to communicate as an artist. Craftsmanship and careful attention to detail in your work are also very important.

Aleksandr Rodchenko, Lengiz. Books on all the branches of knowledge,

advertising poster for the Leningrad Department of Gosizdat

(State Publishing House), 1924

Methodology

Although this is a studio course, there will be a fair amount of reading and writing, which are important skills in your career as an artist. Therefore, even though we will be meeting three hours a week in person, be expected to work outside of class. You are welcome to use the gallery workspace during regular open hours (M-TH from noon to 8:00 p.m. and F/Sat from noon to 5:00 p.m.).

Attendance & Participation

Attendance is mandatory. You are allowed no more than three absences during the semester, but after that, each absence will lower your grade by .50 of your final grade. Late arrivals or early departures will be pro-rated and counted as absences. If you miss a class, it is your responsibility to contact a classmate to make up any assignments. Demonstrations and presentations will not be repeated. Cell phones are not allowed in class. Please bring your journal to every class. With advance notice, some classes will meet in the Newell Center for Arts Technology.

Quality of Work

Projects should demonstrate your creativity, idea/source material/research, craftsmanship, attention to details, technical elements and mastery, experimentation, progress, effort, and evidence of time spent on the assignment. Did you go beyond approaching your project as an exercise, and thoroughly investigate your ideas? In what ways?

Evaluative factors of projects will include:

Development and Preparation

Prepared for class & ready to work

Sketchbook, models, or other prep work

Other research and development

Overall Craft

Craftsmanship, care in execution, and attention to details

Technique/technical skills

Material and process sensitivity

Concept and Creativity

Full development of initial ideas

Creative approach to concept, original design and content

Consideration and application of formal knowledge

Effort and Final Presentation

Final touches/clean-up as necessary

Articulation of idea/intent in critique

Critique skills and comments for others

Ready for critique on time

Grading

The final grade will be evaluated primarily from the quality of your work based on the objectives of the assignments and how successfully these objectives were accomplished. Completion of all work is essential, and attendance and participation are mandatory. While effort will be considered (attitude, progress, improvement), your final grade is based mostly on the overall quality of your work demonstrated in the final portfolio. We will discuss criteria for evaluation as a group, so that everyone is clear about grading.

Work will be discussed in critiques and individual conferences. You will be given grades for assignments in individual meetings at midterm. If you have specific concerns about your grade or would like grade feedback before this time, please schedule a meeting with me. There will also be a final critique and final meeting for feedback at or near the end of the semester.

Point System

4.0 – Phenomenal

3.5 – Excellent

3.0 – Very Good

2.5 – Significantly above average

2.0 – Adequate fulfillment of ALL requirements of class

1.5 – Less than adequate fulfillment of MOST requirements of class

1.0 – Passing but not meeting the requirements of the course

0.0 – Failure to meet the minimum requirements of the course

Note: Completely fulfilling the requirements of the course in a solid way is considered a 2.0 grade. To excel, you must demonstrate additional commitment and effort that will be evident in your work. In order to receive your final grade, you must attend an individual checkout meeting in which your work space area is proven to be cleaned and returned to its original gallery condition.

Required Publications @ SLU Bookstore or Amazon

Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art by D.B. Burkeman with Monica LoCascio (Cathy will hand out in class)

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution by Cedar Lewisohn

Street Art Cookbook: A Guide to Techniques and Materials by Benke Carlsson and Hop Louie

Other readings will be handed out in class and/or posted in the course’s Sakai site. Please print them out and bring to class when I assign them. Assigned readings are mandatory. Each reading is designed to enhance your learning outside of class and give you the intellectual tools to make, critique, and discuss art. Critiques and artist statements and evaluations must reference the assigned reading. You may be required to write responses or summaries and/or be quizzed on any readings or lecture materials.

Optional Publication @ SLU Bookstore or Amazon

Street Art Book: 60 Artists in their own Words by Ric Blackshaw and Liz Farrelly

Additional Resources

The Owen D. Young Library is starting to build a small collection of resources related to street art. In the meantime, I have brought in several books and journals from my personal library for you to refer to. Please don’t take them from the gallery or lend them to anyone. Some of these resources would be difficult to replace.

Supplies

The gallery will provide most of the tools and equipment you will need for this course (journal binding materials, X-acto knives, cutting mats, silkscreens, ink, etc., but you should plan on buying a large sketchpad (18×24 inches) from the bookstore, as well as drawing pencils of your choice.

Getting started

The first class project involves having you create a text-based street name and a visual “brand” or avatar. The avatar can be image-based or text-based, and it is one that you will use, re-use, and refine throughout the course of the semester in your artworks and on various social media sites. You can draw or paint your avatar or use Photoshop, a Xerox machine, etc. It’s “do-it-yourself” (DIY) and totally up to you. Using these street names, you will create primary (or secondary accounts) in Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, Instagram, and/or Twitter. On Flickr and Facebook, sign up for at least five current, active groups related to street art (keywords = street art, stickers, wheatpaste, stencils, etc.). You are encouraged to join many more than five groups in order to give you a better sense of the global street art community. Go to my Facebook page to find suggestions for street artists and collectives.

Later in the semester, I will add you as student cataloguers to the Artstor Digital Library, but be sure to go in and change your password as soon as you get an email prompt from me.

Street Art Studio Projects!

During the course of the semester, we will explore and work in a variety of media related to street art and street culture, including wheatpastes, stickers, stencils, silk-screens, and zines. I am also hoping that we will collaborate as a group to create a piece of public street art in downtown Potsdam or Canton. Projects during the semester may be altered, added, or removed according to the progress of the class and as time, facilities, and supplies allow.

Do the right thing!

There will be designated areas in the Griffiths Arts Center and the Noble Center to display your work. We will also try to arrange other public display areas elsewhere on campus. It is very important that you not vandalize personal, public, or private property in relation to anything you create this semester. Doing so would jeopardize the future of the course and get us all in trouble. If you are caught vandalizing property, you will receive a 0 for the course. Chances are that if you ask, you might be able to post things in certain areas with permission. We’ll talk more about this in class.

The pegatinas writing assignment with Marina Llorente and the Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive project with John Collins have both gone so well that I’ve decided to develop a new course proposal that would offer students the opportunity to conduct research and write about street art stickers and ephemera related to street culture for the Street Art Graphics digital archive. One of the biggest game changers for the archive is that I’m trying to convince SLU to convert from ContentDM to Artstor Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloguing and image management software system that would provide several improvements. In addition to higher quality image presentation, the Artstor cataloguing tool includes a vocabulary warehouse so that artists’ names, geographic locations, and subject headings are automatically linked to authority records from the Library of Congress and the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, among others. Metadata schemas are highly customizable, as are different user roles for collaborative cataloguing. Artstor will also store and back up all of our source images for long-term, off-site preservation. Most important, however, is the fact that Shared Shelf allows users to publish content directly to the Web through Shared Shelf Commons, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Omeka, Google, and other outlets. This last feature is what is most exciting. Despite how well Artstor presents images, I have avoided using it up until now because content is available only to paid subscribers (not very democratic of them, is it?). With Shared Shelf Commons, however, we could share our digital content freely with everyone in keeping with St. Lawrence University’s open access policies.

Here is what I have so far for the course overview and the initial list of required readings. Now I have to put together the assignments and the weekly schedule and submit this puppy to the art & art history department for their approval. Fingers crossed in advanced!

Street Art Graphics & People’s Archive Course Overview

This course offers students the opportunity to conduct research and write about street art graphics for an online digital archive available on St. Lawrence University’s Richard F. Brush Art Gallery Web site (http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/digitalcollections/streetartgraphics.php) and on Artstor Shared Shelf Commons, a free, open access international digital image library of arts and sciences (http://www.sscommons.org/openlibrary/welcome.html#1). The Street Art Graphics & People’s Archive is based primarily on contemporary street art stickers and ephemera related to street culture from countries around the world, including Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States. Topics addressed include animal rights, consumer capitalism, environment, football, gender and sexuality, labor, police brutality, political protests, racism, social justice, and surveillance, among others. The course enables students to use real world examples of street art culture to understand current global issues and to be part of writing history through citizen journalism. Incorporating critical thinking and visual/media literacies, students will learn how to annotate images, hone their writing skills, and contribute their work to a vibrant and unique digital image archive. A digital geo-mapping project at the end of the semester will further contextualize items in the archive.

Morrone, Melissa, ed. Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond. Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2014. Print. (Chapters include “Whatcha Doin’ After the Demo? The Importance of Archiving Political Posters” by Vince Teetart; “To Spread the Revolution: Anarchist Archives and Libraries” by Jessica Moran; “Building an Archive from Below: Reflections from Interference Archive” by Molly Fair; “Librarian Is My Occupation: A History of the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street” by Jaime Taylor and Zachary Loeb; and “Why Archive? and Other Important Questions Asked by Occupy Wall Street” by Sian Evans, Anna Perricci, and Amy Roberts.)

Pollock, Caitlin M. J., and Andrea Battleground. A Gallery for the Outlaw: Archiving the Art of the Iconoclast. Association of College and Research Libraries. 2013. Print.

The fall 2013 pegatinas final writing writing assignment for Dr. Marina Llorente’s ESP 439 seminar Literatura, cine y cultura en la España contemporànea went really well. Having the students first annotate the images made a big difference. Students were also given the chance to submit preliminary drafts of their work to get feedback on their writing. The students who annotated images, conducted additional research, and revised their writing subsequently aced the assignment. During the upcoming week, I am going to post examples from several students to be able to show others this process of writing about stickers. Today’s featured student is Jamie Abraham ’15, and she gave permission to have her work included on Stickerkitty. She analyzed a group of stickers about environmental issues in Spain. Here are two.

————————

Text: Safe? — Nuclear? — No, Thank You!

Image: Skull disguised as nuclear power plant

Logo: Joves d’esquerra verda, an environmental organization that focuses on the betterment of Cataluña and a youth sub-organization of the political party Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (Iniciativa por Cataluña Verdes).

This sticker was created by Joves d’esquerra verda. They provide a link to the interactive and informative Web site, and the organization’s logo is also presented on the sticker. The text Segur? translates to Safe?. Coupled with the image of a skull underneath the nuclear power machine illustrates the message that nuclear energy is not safe for citizens and will propose real issues for humans and the environment. A fifth of Spain’s energy is nuclear via seven power plants, with the recent closure of one in Garoña. This sticker highlights the lack of information provided by nuclear companies to citizens regarding issues of environmental and human health. However, it demonstrates the effort of a politically associated group, and more importantly a youth organization, that shows the proactivity of the younger generations. This sticker presents the widely translated phrase in opposition to nuclear energy Nuclears? No, gràcies. This indicates the large movement of regions refusing nuclear energy. The situation above ground seems innocuous; simple structures and blue skies suggest nothing is wrong. Segur? questions this appearance and underground the truth is revealed; the bold text No, gràcies is placed close to the skull to draw the eyes of the reader to the dangerous repercussions of nuclear energy.

Simple, yet effective sticker illustrating the necessity to abolish nuclear energy usage and to close power plants. The text is bold and grabs the attention of the audience. It is not overly aggressive, but is firm in its request. “No to nuclear energy. No to the ATC” (Almacén temporal centralizado de España/Centralized Temporary Storage), which is a project to expand current nuclear waste facilities to accommodate high activity level waste from Spain, France, and the UK. Opposition highlights the lack of economic benefits, the risks of building facilities and transporting high-level waste, and the overall discomfort and apprehension from citizens. This sticker calls for the closure of Garoña, a nuclear plant in Burgos, Spain, and continues to request closure of the rest of Spain’s seven nuclear power plants. The smiling sun is the international symbol of anti-nuclear organizations and its presence suggests the inclusion of the rest of the world in rejecting nuclear energy. Finally, the logo for Ecologistas en Acción propagates their presence in fighting for environmental issues.

From here, I will work with Arline Wolfe, the SLU arts metadata technician, to polish the writing and to add links and subject headings to each item in the Street Art Graphics digital archive. The biggest news ahead, however, is that I’m making a case at St. Lawrence to have the University sign up for Artstor’s Shared Shelf Commons, a free, international, open access digital image library of arts and sciences. Artstor is one of the best platforms I’ve come across in terms of publishing digital image collections, but I’ve avoided using it in the past because content is only available to paid subscribers (like colleges, universities, museums, etc.). However, with the Shared Shelf Commons, users can now post materials and make them available to everyone, everywhere. More to follow!

For the upcoming assignment at St. Lawrence University to have Marina Llorente’s students analyze political stickers from Spain, I decided to split the project into two parts. Part One will ask students to annotate the images, and Part Two will ask students to use the annotations to write about what the stickers mean (i.e., what are the larger issues that the stickers point to?). I’m doing it this way now because the last time we offered the assignment, students did well contextualizing the stickers but sometimes forgot to describe all of the textual and visual elements of the stickers. Those descriptions are important in a digital archive because people access images through word searches. If descriptive words are missing, access is curtailed. Descriptions fields are so thorny! If you think about it, one needs to list everything in the sticker, but one also needs to provide historical and cultural background and draw attention to issues beyond the sticker itself. Below is what I prepared for Part One of the writing assignment using this sticker from the Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anti-capitalist Left).

ASSIGNMENT

For this assignment, you will be analyzing political street art stickers from Spain for a Street Art Graphics digital archive that is publicly available on the gallery’s Web site:

1. The first step is to annotate the images. This will help you with your analysis.

2. Open the image file in Preview and click on Tools/Annotate/Text.[1]

3. Choose a contrasting color and type large numbers onto all of the visual and textual elements in the image including each line of text, the images, logos, Web sites, and anything else. Number these elements in a way that makes logical sense. The most important elements should be listed first. Every element in the sticker is there for a reason, so it’s your job to figure them all out. After you number the elements, save and close the file. If you need to re-number anything, you’ll need to re-start with the raw image file again (once the numbered file is saved and closed, it locks the annotations in place). You’ll see below how #1A, #1B, #1C, and #1D all indicate text; #2 indicates a face; #3 indicates a logo; #4 indicates a Web site; and #5 indicates a QR code.

INSTRUCTIONS

#1 text: Type all of the text that appears in the sticker in a way that makes logical sense. For cataloguing purposes, the first letter of each word is capitalized, and the remaining letters in each word should be small (not capitalized). Use a dash between different sections of the text so that it reads in a normal, common sense way. If the text appears in Spanish, translate it into English in the same fashion. Any and all Spanish text in the sticker should be in written in italics.

#2 image/color: Identify who or what is being represented in the image (people, objects, buildings, graphic design elements, color, composition, i.e., everything!) and include any other information that seems relevant or important. Be as specific as possible. For example, in my description below, see how I put “photo portrait” of Angela Merkel instead of “picture,” “drawing,” “illustration,” etc. “Portrait” here also implies head vs. her entire body in action. I also noted who Merkel is and how the type font affects our interpretation of the text. In terms of color, most stickers are either black on white or black and other colors on white.

#3 logo: Describe the logo’s shape, color, etc. and what the logo suggests. Does it play off any other existing logo (i.e., is it a form of “culture jamming”)? HINT: Take a close-up screen shot of the logo and drag the image file into Google Images and see what you find. It’s a handy way to see if and how the logo relates to anything else. Sometimes, it’s the only way to find out!

#4 Web site: Describe the purpose or function of the organization that created the sticker.

#5 QR code: Find the Web site where the QR code sends you. Is it something else besides the organization’s main Web site? What is the purpose of the Web site?

#2 image/color: Photo portrait of German politician Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany (2005-present). Her face is covered by a large circle that hides most of her eyes, nose, and mouth. The use of a bold graphic type font suggests an urgent appeal for a response. Black and army green on white.

#4 Web site: www.anticapitalistas.org for Izquierda Anticapitalista or Anti-capitalist Left, a Spanish revolutionary, ecologist, feminist, and internationalist organization that fights against all kinds of exploitation, oppression, and domination over people and the environment. The full-color logo in red, purple, and green signifies the different ideas that the organization supports: socialists or communists (red), feminists (purple), and green movements (green).

#5 QR code: A QR code on the sticker points to the Web site http://www.anticapitalistas.org/elecciones2011/index.html, which encourages people to vote for an alternative anti-capitalist government during the Spanish general election on November 20, 2011. The Web site states, “El 20N desobedece” or “The 20N disobeys.

Part Two: Writing a 150- to 200-word analysis of the sticker, placing it in a social and historical context. More information to follow!

To prepare for the assignment, Marina and I met last week to go through my recent acquisitions from several contributors: the Spanish poet Jorge Reichmann, SLU professor of Spanish Steven White, Oliver Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, and Gabriel Garcia Ruiz and other contacts in Spain. Marina and I put together seven sets of eight stickers each representing a variety of socio-political themes: the environment, political parties, gender, the Spanish Constitution, workers’ unions, student strikes, and the Catalonian separatist movement. Students will work in pairs to write short bilingual description fields for each sticker that will be added to the Street Art Graphics digital archive. It’s a lot tougher than it may sound to write these description fields. One needs to list all of the visual and textual elements (subjects, logos, colors, composition, graphic design, etc.) and outline what these elements represent or mean. Descriptions are limited to 150 to 200 words each in English and Spanish.

“In the spring of 2012, in response to the Spanish government’s severe austerity measures, Spanish miners from Asturias united to raise awareness and call for justice. With high unemployment, the miners became guerrilla freedom fighters looking to save their jobs and the mining industry. The protesters went on strike in late May and shut down the country’s coal supply to protest the government’s decision to reduce mine subsidies by 63 percent. Anticapitalistas.org is the Web site for Izquierda Anticapitalista, an organization that fights against ‘oppression, exploitation, and the domination of people and nature.’ The sticker depicts the profile of a man wearing a knitted watch cap and a bandana to conceal his identity. The sticker also contains a QR code, easily scanned with a smart phone application to spread the resistance movement.”

“This tribute sticker presents a photograph of Lluís Companys i Jover over stripes of yellow and red, two colors synonymous with Catalonia and the region’s long struggle to become an independent state. Companys was actually born in 1882 and was the leader of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) or Republican Left of Catalonia. Founded in 1931, the ERC remains a nationalist party that seeks independence from Spain. Companys served as President of the Generalitat of Catalonia between 1933 and 1940. After the Spanish Civil War, he went to France but was later captured by the Gestapo secret police and sent to a Spanish jail where he was tortured and later executed by a firing squad. Companys was one of the most influential martyrs of the Catalonian separatist movement, and his death has inspired thousands of nationalists who seek independence.”

As a side note, I needed to scan some additional stickers yesterday for the upcoming assignment. My associate at work, Carole Mathey, asked if it was a hassle to do all this scanning, but I described how it allows me to get to know the stickers a little better. Sometimes I see things in the digital image more readily than in print, and the scanning, cropping, and color correcting forces me to look very closely at each image. Carole called it “speed dating.” A muted, light grey version of Picasso’s Guernica is represented in the background of this sticker underneath bold red letters, for example, which I didn’t notice until I scanned the sticker.

I haven’t had much time to post on Stickerkitty lately, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping busy with other things. I heard recently from SLU professor of modern languages, Marina Llorenta, that she’d like to repeat the assignment we created in 2012 to have her students conduct research on political stickers from Spain for her course on “Literature, Film, and Popular Culture in Contemporary Spain,” a project that later turned into an SLU art gallery exhibition called Pegatinas Políticas, which you can read about here. To prepare for the upcoming assignment this fall 2014 semester, I have been keeping an eye out for any sources from which I could acquire new Spanish stickers for her students to analyze. Last November, I contacted close to 30 Spanish political and grassroots organizations via their Facebook Web sites without much response. One group, the Popular Unity Movement Against Crisis, sent me 19 fantastic digital image files but didn’t send any physical items. Marina and I agreed we wanted the students to study the actual paper or vinyl stickers in real life, however, so my searching continued.

I’ve had much better luck finding Spanish stickers this spring. I contacted another SLU professor of modern languages, Steven White, who is currently in Madrid directing the SLU off-campus study program. He made contact with someone via eBay.es to help acquire a set of Spanish stickers dating from the late 1970s to present day (click here to view 31 stickers). A few of the 1970s stickers depict Adolfo Suárez, the first democratically elected prime minister of Spain after General Francisco Franco’s 41-year dictatorship. Suárez just passed away in March of 2014, and Steven thought perhaps that’s why these stickers appeared so recently on the market.

There are several Catalan independence movement stickers in the group, and from the same dealer we also acquired a set of eight historical stickers by the Direccion General de Juventud y Promocion Sociocultural that promoted the new Spanish Constitution of 1978. The sticker, Viva La Constitucion, La Soberania De España Reside En El Pueblo, means “Long Live The Constitution, The Sovereignty Of The People Living In Spain.”

Steven, a poet himself, is friends with the Spanish poet and sociologist Jorge Riechmann who helped contribute several stickers relating to current environmental issues. The sticker from Ecologistas En Acción (“Ecologists in Action”) states, Si No Reducen Las Emisiones, No Nos Representan,or “If You Do Not Reduce Emissions, Do Not Represent Us.” A total of 47 new stickers from Steven White and Jorge Riechmann can be viewed here.

Other stickers that have come in during the past couple of weeks represent various political parties and organizations, such as the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor), the Izquierda Anticapitalista (Anti-Capitalist Left), the Liga Estudantil Galega (Galician Students’ League), the Galiza Nova (the New Galicia), the Partido Comunista del Pueblo Castellano (Communist Party of the Castillian People? or Peoples of Spain?), and the Esquerda Unida (United Left). One can get a pretty good lesson in the range of Spanish political parties and Spanish autonomous communities by studying these stickers. Os Nosos Dereitos Non Se Recortan from the Esquerda Unida sticker below is Galician for “Our Rights Are Not Cut.”

And my sticker pal, Oli Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, is originally from Barcelona. He was there recently and sent me a bunch of new Catalan stickers. The one below depicts the Catalan donkey, a symbol often used in reaction to the Spanish symbol of the Osborne bull, superimposed on top of the red and yellow striped Senyera flag with a blue star, or Estelada blava of the Catalan independence movement.

All told and with the help of friends and others, there are now 139 new stickers from all over Spain dating from the 1970s to present day for Marina’s students to analyze and write about. I will fine-tune the assignment for the fall of 2014. Last time, we had the students write short essays of about 500 words each per sticker, as well as even shorter versions of about 150 words each that would be used as description fields or metadata for the Street Art Graphics digital archive. For some reason, the students often wrote two separate, unrelated pieces. Typically, they did a fine job contextualizing the historical and cultural content of the stickers, but not such a good job describing what was being depicted in each sticker and what those depictions signified. In that regard, some of the basic information for each sticker was missing. Cataloguing can be a challenge; one needs to identify the visual and textual elements, describe their significance, and outline the larger issues that are pointed to in each sticker.

This semester, I asked one of my students, Rebecca Clayman ’17, to do research and write descriptions for a series of four Egyptian stickers from the Arab Spring protests for the Street Art Graphics digital archive (scroll down and click on “Egypt”). Since neither of us reads or speaks Arabic, Rebecca interviewed Gisele El Khoury, the director of St. Lawrence University’s Language Resource Center and Arabic professor. Dating from the beginning of the uprisings in 2011, the stickers are in bright bold colors: blue (“electoral process”), purple (“freedom”), green (“democracy”), and red (“social justice”). Gisele provided the Arabic script and English translations for each sticker, and Arline Wolfe, the library’s arts metadata technician, provided subject headings using her standard set of controlled vocabularies (U.S. Library of Congress, etc.). Here is one example of the team effort:

“The Arab Spring revolution in Egypt fought against the thirty-year regime of President Hosni Mubarak through anti-government and pro-democracy protests. Inspired by the successful revolution in Tunisia weeks beforehand, the Egyptian protests began in January 2011. This sticker, written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, is one in a series of four with colorful political messages. The empowering slogan at the top of each sticker من دلوقتي حاعرف حقي means ‘Starting this moment, I know my right.’ In the center, the phrase العملية الانتخابية translates to the ‘electoral process.’ At the bottom, the text يعني صوتي أنا يعيّن رئيس الجمهورية means ‘my voice (vote) will decide the president of the republic’.”

During subsequent discussions with Gisele, she showed me an amazing interactive timeline related to the Arab Spring dating between December 19, 2011, and December 17, 2012. Produced by the Guardian, The path of protest outlines “protest/government response to protest,” “political move,” “regime change,” and “international/external response” for hundreds of different events spanning 17 countries with links to full articles in the Guardian for each event.

In the fall of 2014, Gisele will be teaching a three-week course unit on the “Arab Spring through Graffiti,” and she and I are talking about various mapping techniques for our respective street art projects.

Special thanks to Rebecca, Gisele, and Arline for their work on this series of stickers.